Integrated circuits (“IC”) generally are mass-produced by various design/manufacturing companies and then sold to client companies. Often, client companies may have a need to edit (i.e., adjust circuitry by physically altering the circuitry) certain ICs (e.g., flip-chip circuits) using focused ion beam (“FIB”) milling technology to better suit a particular application or function the client is trying to implement. To edit an IC, engineers at the client company may mark suggested IC “edits” on an electronic masked design data of the IC and submit the masked design data to the design/manufacturing company.
Engineers at the design/manufacturing company then may manually evaluate the masked design data with the suggested changes incorporated therein by conducting a feasibility study. In a feasibility study, the engineers determine whether the suggested edits are possible, aggressive, conservative, and/or on a boundary between locations suitable and not suitable for editing. Specifically, the engineers must determine whether the suggested edits are at all feasible, whether the edits are aggressive in nature and carry a substantial risk of failure, whether the edits are conservative in nature and have a substantial probability of success, and whether the edits are located on a boundary between suitable and non-suitable editing locations. Such evaluations generally are manually performed, wherein engineers use their own knowledge of IC design rules and milling (i.e., etching) procedures to determine whether the suggested edits are feasible.
However, there exist numerous disadvantages to manually determining whether a particular IC edit is feasible. For example, engineers usually are unable to thoroughly and efficiently analyze an IC to determine whether a suggested edit is truly feasible, since engineers rely on personal experience and IC editing knowledge, which may be limited or incomplete. Further, if an edit is determined to be unfeasible, engineers may find it difficult to suggest an effective alternative to the suggested edit, even though such a viable alternative may exist. Further still, engineers typically are not able to incorporate the physics of milling machinery into editing considerations, since such considerations would become prohibitively intensive and difficult. For similar reasons, engineers generally do not rely on explicit IC design rules. Often, visually-inspected edit suggestions are rejected based solely on an engineer's impression of the difficulty level of the proposed edit, even though such an edit may have a reasonable chance for success. For these and various other reasons, engineers often cannot accurately, efficiently and effectively determine the probability of a successful IC edit, nor can engineers consistently provide viable alternatives to unsuitable, proposed IC edits.